Because he needed to. “It is becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothing-ness) behind it.”

“With her strong jaw and confidently bared breastbone, Degas’s Little Dancer statuette … absolutely does not care what we think. Yet her mystique has only grown. Who was that girl, really? And who was she to Degas? These questions fuel [a new] musical, which is reportedly part fact, part fantasy,” in which Peck is starring this fall.

“The Tony-winning classical troupe performs in Penn Quarter on two of Washington’s biggest stages, but its offices and shops are miles away” – scattered throughout the District and beyond. Nelson Pressley looks in – and sees why STC has bought land on which to consolidate.

“Members of the public reacted angrily when the new edition – part of the Penguin Modern Classics range – was revealed [last] Wednesday. The cover was deemed ‘misleading’ and ‘creepy’. Author Giles Paley-Phillips said it looked ‘more like Lolita‘. But Penguin said it stressed ‘the light and the dark aspects’ of Dahl’s work.”

He appeared from the California wilderness in 1911, “For the last five years of his life until he died in 1916 from tuberculosis, he was a sort of living diorama, as well as a voice for a vanishing past … isolated as a survivor of the disease and destruction that had claimed his culture.”

Bari’s Teatro Petruzzelli, the country’s fourth-largest opera house, is simply out of money. With both the city council and the regional government having slashed funding, the Petruzzelli has cancelled the two productions it had scheduled for this fall, and no one is sure if or when it will reopen.

That’s what acoustical scientists at NYU are trying to find out, as they bring banks of microphones and a Disklavier out to the Steinway factory to gather “a very dense acoustical scan of the radiation pattern of the grand piano.” (includes audio)

“[There’s] a degree of cultural and political embarrassment to start with – over a writer whose near-total indifference to politics is still startling and whose attitudes to women are likely to win few allies today. But there is a deeper embarrassment yet. For so many male readers, he is the quintessential poet of adolescence. How many of us were convinced on reading him that this was what poetry was really like, heady, incantatory, obsessively sensual? How many proceeded to write terrible imitations of him in the back of school notebooks? That is what people wince over.”

Huecheros is “the [Guatemalan] slang term for antiquity looters, derived from the Maya word for armadillo. On a building overlooking an ancient plaza, the looters scrawl a message, brazen and taunting: “We, the huecheros, stuck it to this place.” Here’s the who, what, where, and how.

Recent research from Sweden found “that when dogs solved the problem and earned a reward they wagged their tails more and were more eager to repeat the experience than if they were just given a reward.” The study was inspred by earlier research showing a similar effect in cattle. (How could they tell?)

The canvases, which include Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, have technically been on loan from the royal family’s collection ever since the Spanish Civil War. But now the National Heritage Office is building a new museum to house the Royal Collections, due to open in 2016.

Art historian and Painter Imants Lancmanis first came to Rundale Palace, a grand 54-room pile completed in 1740 for the Duke of Courland, in 1964, while he was an art student in Riga – and he spent the next half-century renovating it. (During the Soviet years, of course, work went very slowly.)

“Sources tell NY1 that a letter from James Claffey, the President of Local 1, sent to members in the stagehands union earlier this week, said the Met rejected a proposal to freeze union wages for the next five years. Instead, opera management pushed for a 14.5 percent cut in pay and benefits.”

Lumenocity, a collaboration between the Cincinnati Symphony, Cincinnati Ballet, and video artists Brave Berlin – projecting intricate images onto the façade of Music Hall – was that media market’s top-rated TV broadcast last Saturday. And all 42,500 free tickets available for the three-night run were snapped up in 12 minutes. (includes video)

“Common sense might suggest that artists well ensconced in their careers would look askance at FringeNYC’s no-frills, DIY ethic … But to Ms. Prince and other longtime grown-ups, the chance to present a show cheaply in New York is a potent lure, even if each production has only 15 minutes to put up its set and 15 minutes to strike it afterward.”

“Plans for the still massive and transformative project he and architect Frank Gehry are orchestrating for King St. W. could take a decade to execute. But there’s no sign that the man who runs the empire created by his father, a.k.a. Honest Ed, has any plans to scale back his own role as presiding czar.”

“In a nutshell, QuickHitz doesn’t care if you’re Drake, Lorde or Lana Del Rey. Your single is going to get cut down to about two minutes, with a hard target of 24 songs — about twice the number common to a patient society — during each hour of airtime.”

Summer is the high season for large-scale outdoor concerts and festivals — “a city like Jerusalem has festivals practically every week”. And though local performers are inured to the threat of attacks, local police are refusing to grant permits for outdoor gatherings. The result is that hotels, restaurants and bands take a financial hit. “Suddenly, they’re stuck in Europe for two days. If they’ve got a large entourage and crew, putting them up can be quite expensive.”

“This is an account about how two New York museums seized this dream — and how one of them clings to it still, while the other has found that the Internet’s true value isn’t in being everywhere but in enhancing the here.”

“For many, Sculthorpe defined what it meant to be an Australian composer and defined a uniquely Australian sound. … He would become our most acclaimed contemporary composer, admired for pieces like his 1960s series Irkanda – ‘scrub country’ – … and later work such as Kakadu (1988), Memento Mori (1993) and the Rites of Passage, originally commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House.”

New York City Ballet performs Ivesiana, a 1954 ballet by George Balanchine set to the music of Charles Ives. The soloists are Sara Leland and Francisco Moncion in “Central Park in the Dark,” Suki Schorer ... read more

There was a mimeo magazine called ppHOO69 *Intercontinental*1969. It was edited by Pradip Choudhuri and published by Subhas Ghose, with a front cover by Alejandro Jodorowsky and a back cover by Claude Pélieu. The poems ... read more

What happened to the genre of academic satire? In the Chronicle Review, Andrew Kay has some ideas; I’d like to offer a different take. Disclaimer: I’m no literary critic. But (a) I am an academic, ... read more

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review Escape to Margaritaville. Here’s an excerpt. * * * The jukebox musical, in which the back catalogue of a songwriter and/or pop star is repurposed as ... read more

The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the bimonthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading. In this ... read more

Howard Da Silva sings “Little Tin Box,” a number by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock from the score of Fiorello!. This performance, introduced by Tony Bennett, was seen on Standing Room Only: Showstoppers, originally telecast ... read more

Their recording histories encompass dozens of collaborations, but in their new albums two of the most prolific recording artists in modern music go it alone. Bill Frisell, Music Is (Okeh) Guitarist ... read more

Is Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) a third Soviet composer to set beside Shostakovich and Prokofiev? An increasing number of musicians seem to think so, including the peerless Latvian-born violinist Gidon Kremer, himself a product of Soviet ... read more

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more ... read more

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss James Levine’s firing. Here’s an excerpt. * * * It was all true. That’s the conclusion of the Metropolitan Opera, which fired James Levine on Monday, ... read more

The Dave Brubeck Quartet plays “St. Louis Blues” on Belgian TV in 1964. Brubeck is the pianist, Paul Desmond the alto saxophonist, Eugene Wright the bassist, and Joe Morello the drummer: (This is the ... read more